Museum openings coincide with Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Anniversary

Friday April 19 marked the 70th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising against the Nazis. Two museum openings coincided with this date. One is the Bronx High School of Science's Holocaust Museum and Study Center. Its' holdings include an extensive collection of Holocaust artifacts. A former teacher began the collection hoping to teach tolerance to the school's students.

The second is Warsaw's Muzeum Historii Żydów Polskich, or Museum of the History of the Polish Jews. The museum will honor 1,000 years of Jewish life in Poland. Friday was a  partial opening for educational and cultural workshop, the Museum's main exhibit should open early in 2014.

Poland was once home to the world's largest Jewish community, and in many ways Jewish life was centered in Poland. That community was decimated by the Nazis during World War II. The last 20 years have marked a change in the Polish national conscious in terms of its Jewish past. The influence of Pope John Paul II and the end of Communism has allowed Poland to acknowledge the extent of Jewish life in the country's history, the role of collaborators in the murder of Jews, as well as the extent to which ordinary Poles risked their lives to hide and save Jews from the Nazis.

(Cold War) Politics makes strange bedfellows, indeed

American essayist Charles Dudley Warner once said "Politics makes strange bedfellows". The United States government was quite ambivalent towards former Nazis in the period after World War II, as highlighted in the book "Useful Enemies: John Demjanjuk and America's Open-Door Policy for Nazi War Criminals".

Author Richard Rashke contends that the government found former Nazis useful in the struggle against Communism. Among the war criminals is John Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian-American living in the Cleveland area who once worked as a guard at the Sobibor death camp in Poland. Also discussed is German scientist Wernher von Braun, who helped produce V-2 rockets used against Great Britain during the War. Von Braun went on to receive the President's Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service in 1959.

The New England Holocaust Memorial

The New England Holocaust Memorial is located in Carmen Park, on Boston's Freedom Trail. It is one of the more interactive Holocaust tributes in the US, and its' design is rich in symbolism.

Six glass towers rise from the memorial. Six million numbers are etched in the glass, representing the six million Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust.

Each tower represents one of the major Nazi extermination camps: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka.

Visitors pass through the towers on a black granite path. A steel grate covers a six foot deep chamber at the base of each tower. Smoke rises from charred embers at the bottom of these pits, evoking thoughts of the gas chambers used in the camps.